Nation-building from afar

Sudanese refugee looks for ways to help homeland from Illinois

March 16, 2011|By Victoria Pierce, Special to the Tribune

Kenneth Elisapana, who is from Sudan, founded South Sudan Voices of Hope in 2005 to help his homeland. The charity is working to improve drinking water and is building a medical clinic. (Chuck Berman, Chicago Tribune)

Kenneth Elisapana's life today as a 43-year-old father of two could not be more different than his childhood growing up in war-torn southern Sudan.

His father, a Christian, was killed for "opposing" Islam, he said, and his family was forced to move from their rural village to the slums on the desert outskirts of Sudan's capital city, Khartoum. As non-Arabs they could not find work to improve their conditions, and life was unbearable.

"As a young man I wanted a better future. There was no future in that desert, in the slums," said Elisapana, who lives on Chicago's West Side a couple of blocks from the city's borders with Oak Park and Cicero.

In 1992, at age 24, he escaped to Egypt with a few friends. He told his family that if they did not hear from him they should assume he was dead.

It was seven years before he was able to locate them again and three more years before he could help his mother and sister move to Nairobi, Kenya.

Memories of his youth and compassion for his homeland led Elisapana to found South Sudan Voices of Hope in 2005 to raise money for a variety of projects, including the building of a medical clinic, working to improve drinking water and providing goats for families in Sudan.

The need for humanitarian aid and economic investment will be even more critical now that South Sudan has voted to become an independent country. The vote followed decades of violent conflicts that pitted a government dominated by Arab Muslims in northern Sudan against black Christians or animists in the south.

The proposal passed with 98 percent approval in January, and about 3,000 of those votes came from Sudanese refugees in the Midwest, said Elisapana, who helped coordinate the voting in the Chicago area.

During decades of civil war millions of southern Sudanese were displaced within their own country — like Elisapana's family — or fled as refugees to other countries in Africa or around the world.

Many will be returning home, but with few resources and little to return to they will need help, Elisapana said.

A fundraiser for the Voices of Hope will be held Saturday at Gary Memorial United Methodist Church in Wheaton. Elisapana's relationship with the church began when he gave a speech there about the conflicts in Sudan's western region of Darfur. The Rev. Tony Asta said Elisapana left quite an impression.

"It was just a matter of the passion that he had and the enthusiasm he had," said Asta, who is chairman of Voices of Hope. "In a way, he is the genuine article."

Other churches also assist Voice for Hope, including Elisapana's own church, Euclid Avenue Methodist in Oak Park, which held a Mardi Gras fundraiser March 5.

The Rev. Marti Scott, of Euclid Avenue Methodist, said Elisapana happened to drive by one day four years ago and saw the banner indicating the church was a welcoming community.

"He stopped in and told us his story. We were moved," Scott said.

During the Oak Park fundraiser, Elisapana gave a brief history of the conflicts in Sudan and outlined the challenges ahead.

"This is a remarkable achievement," Elisapana said. "We never thought it would happen in my lifetime."

Elisapana arrived in the United States as an exchange student at Taylor University in Indiana while attending college in Kenya. His education had come about because of a chance meeting in Egypt with an English woman who had been his Sunday school teacher back in his Sudanese village when he was 7.

He was working with a refugee program at an Episcopalian church in Cairo when the woman happened to walk in. Their meeting was joyous and when she returned to England her own church raised the money to send Elisapana to college.

He wound up at Taylor University in 1999, when he was 31. When he arrived, he was one of only 10 black students at the school. But the differences in culture went far beyond skin color.

The first time he walked into the dining hall he was amazed at the amount of food.

"I had never seen food like they had in the dining commons like I saw that day," Elisapana said, recalling that he ate rice and beans even though the cook encouraged him to take some meat.

And his dorm room was so nice it seemed unreal.

"I could not believe that people lived like this anywhere in the world," Elisapana said.

But his mind was not so far from home.

"When I went to sleep I would think of the children in Sudan," he said. "These pictures would come in my head. I'm here so happy in this clean place where I am drinking water from the tap while they are drinking from the river."

Elisapana has one brother still living in southern Sudan, and his mother and sister are considering returning home from Nairobi. But one brother was killed and they do not know the circumstances of his death.

Elisapana will be visiting Sudan this spring with Voices of Hope. He will be delivering supplies and medicine and checking on the group's projects, including the construction of Hope Clinic in Mvolo.